Links in a mysterious chain

In the 19th century, Americans spoke about death but not sex. In the 21st, it’s the opposite. Epidemics have been the world’s prime cause of sudden death for three millennia, so our predecessors would not have been discombobulated by the appearance of Ebola. We are.

The Bible describes plagues that changed history: 10 of them in Egypt, and one that struck down 185,000 Assyrians overnight, quick-acting like the influenza attack of 1918 described in The Journal of the American Medical Association: “first symptom at 4:00 P.M., died by 10:00 A.M.” An epidemic in 429 B.C. killed one-fourth of Athenians, including the great Pericles, and contributed to the city-state’s eventual defeat by Sparta. William McNeill in Plagues and Peoples (1976) shows how pestilence contributed to the fall of Rome, the end of China’s Han dynasty, the rise of Islam, the decline of the Mongol and Spanish empires, the Louisiana Purchase (due to French deaths in Haiti), and the failure of Germany’s last-try offensive in 1918.

During ancient epidemics some religions gained and some lost believers. Disease undermined Greek polytheistic faith, according to Thucydides: “As for the gods, it seemed to be the same thing whether one worshiped them or not, when one saw the good and bad dying indiscriminately.” Disease helped Christianity conquer Rome, according to historian Rodney Stark, because many Christians nursed the sick instead of fleeing, because the death rate among pagans was greater, and because many Christians who were dying maintained their optimism: As Bishop Cyprian wrote, “many of us are being freed from the world.”

Worldviews have also played a role in transmission. Muslims for centuries quoted Muhammad’s saying, “He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.” Fatalism led many Muslims to disdain Christian health measures as insufficiently faith-based. Many European and American academics, heirs to the Enlightenment, emphasize the role of reason in history and de-emphasize disease. Many who love history emphasize heroic gestures, so schoolchildren once learned about “cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them” as the Light Brigade charged during the Crimean War—but 10 times as many British soldiers in that conflict died of dysentery as from Russian weapons.

Our concern about disease-spreading air travel echoes an 1870s debate about steamships carrying bubonic rats: Faster has always meant more dangerous. Calls to cut off travel from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea echo old calls to quarantine the Crimea or Manchuria. (The word quarantine comes from the Italian quarantina, “forty,” the number of days Venice officials kept possible plague ships waiting off port.) Aztec and Inca empires ended because Old World disease came to America: When Cortez and his small group of soldiers took over Mexico City in 1521, they found canals full of the dead from smallpox. William Prescott wrote in his History of the Conquest of Mexico that “the floors of the dwellings were covered with the prostrate forms of the miserable inmates, some in the agonies of death, others festering in their corruption.”

The major U.S. experience with epidemics starts in 1832, with New Yorkers striving to keep cholera from their homes—but what started in Hindu pilgrimages along the Ganges came to Europe via military movements and crossed the Atlantic to give its regards to Broadway. Manhattan officials were repeatedly slow in coming to grips with the disease, as Charles Rosenberg explains in The Cholera Years (1962), and the search for scapegoats always led some to blame immigrants.

Christians generally recognized that even epidemics took place under God’s sovereign but mysterious authority. Some thought they knew exactly why: The Western Sunday School Messenger in 1832 saw cholera spreading in crowded cities and opined, “Drunkards and filthy, wicked people of all descriptions, are swept away in heaps, as if the Holy God could no longer bear their wickedness.” But that same year Thomas Chalmers, the famous poverty-fighting Scottish divine, explained that even the wisest Christians can see only a few of the links in the chain of events God orchestrates.

In 1849 St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Sandusky lost about one-tenth of their populations to cholera, and 150 of the 350 members of the U.S. 8th Regiment died in Texas. In our Civil War, brother fought against brother but all fought against disease, and far more succumbed to bugs than to bullets. The U.S. record for fear and devastation in one city probably belongs to Memphis in 1878. Some 20,000 left the city in three days of utter panic: Jeanette Keith writes in Fever Season (2012) that “men with guns forced their way aboard already full railroad cars … falling into the laps of scandalized female passengers.” About 17,000 of the 20,000 who did not flee the city contracted yellow fever. More than 5,000 died.

Many were heroes amid scenes of horror, such as “dying parents lying in the same room as their child’s maggot-ridden body.” Christian standouts include nurse Kezia DePelchin and newspaper editor John Keating. Some 111 doctors volunteered day and night, and 33 of them died. Jewish merchant Nathan Menken, a former Union cavalry officer, put up money to clean streets and bake a thousand loaves of bread: One co-worker wrote that he “rushed from hovel to hovel, from sick-bed to sick-bed,” until he came down with the fever and quickly died. Many outsiders contributed generously to charities, sending smoked hams and barrels of flour.

In our Civil War, brother fought against brother but all fought against disease, and far more succumbed to bugs than to bullets.

Thieves pillaged houses, but 526 nurses (362 of them men) came to Memphis from other cities. Civil War veterans frequently said the epidemic was another war for which they had enlisted: They said they were terrified but would hold their ground. Baptist preacher Sylvanus Landrum praised women volunteers who stayed by bedsides even when they were “befouled by that most repulsive and horrible of all substances—black vomit. … The penalty of her service of love is generally death.”

Landrum himself became intimate with death. His 19- and 22-year-old sons still lived by him, and the oldest, Herbert, caught the fever and died: Landrum mourned, “He might have gone away … he was dying for me.” The father had arranged for the other son, George, to take a friend’s children to safety, but when Landrum himself took ill, George returned. Landrum screamed at him: “You are a dead man! Is not one son enough to sacrifice to this plague? Flee from this place.” But George insisted on staying. Soon he died as well. Landrum survived, and later described how a widow not of his congregation asked to see him because “I want to talk to one who had suffered.”

When the epidemic was over, Landrum preached to the remnants of his congregation, saying he had seen the power of God “shown forth as a light in the darkness, a glorious reality,” when the dying proclaimed their faith amid terror. Landrum told his congregation, “Many Rachels are weeping because her children are not; many Davids, in agony, cry out, ‘Would God I had died for thee, o Absalom my son, my son.’”

—See “Deadly arrogance” in this issue for an account of the terrible flu epidemic of 1918